Phandroid, going
on some screenshots from a tipster, is reporting that Verizon's
Galaxy variant, the "Fascinate," is beginning to arrive in
stores, fueling speculation of a September launch. This release
schedule would make sense for Verizon because the carrier has been
busy the last few months launching all of its new
Droid offerings. A September release would give the Fascinate
more visibility in what's quickly becoming a saturated market for
Android-based phones.

Specs
on the Fascinate are almost identical to the
Vibrant. BoyGeniusReport has
obtained training
documents that confirm the following:

The
Fascinate will be running Android 2.1 at launch. According to the
training documents, Flash support will be available by "Year End
2010," which means the device will be seeing an update sometime
in Q4. Who knows, by then it may be getting Android
3.0 Gingerbread --
an unlikely prospect given Samsung's previous issues rolling out
Android updates.

Androinica is
reporting that
Best Buy Reward Zone customers can pre-order the Fascinate starting
today, while regular customers will be able to pre-order on August
29.

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The only benchmark I know of that shows the OMAP 3640 ahead of the Hummingbird is Quadrant, which shows a bug in determining I/O scores when running on the OMAP processor, leading to artificially inflated scores. Other benchmarks that purely measure CPU performance (such as linpack for android) show a lead for Hummingbird.

Most of those tests between the chips were done a while ago and used 2.1.

Since then, numerous tests using the same equipment showed massive improvement when updating to Froyo. I don't think any site has revisited the OMAP vs Snapdragon vs Hummingbird tests with Froyo thrown in the mix. I think an obvious conclusion is that Hummingbird will edge-out the others on 2.1, but moving to 2.2 improves browser and Java performance massively - up to 6x the speed. So operating on 2.1 is an artificial handicap which makes any modern device on 2.2 superior.

Let me spell this out for you. The Droid X and Droid 2 increased in performance going from Eclair to Froyo, as you've now stated multiple times, so why do you think the Galaxy S (which essentially uses identical CPU hardware with some tweaks) will receive any [i]less[/i] of a performance boost?

I think the answer is that you own a Droid X or Droid 2 (or plan to buy one) and have e-penis envy. There is no logical reason to expect that one processor is going to gain much more when moving to Froyo than another considering the fact that they are running CPUs based on identical architectures.